Ideally, the Web’s link structure should reflect real world human relations. A resource a lot of people might like should have more links than something of lower value. You’re bound to find exceptions, of course. Sites stuffed with worthless content may rank higher than yours temporarily, but you can bet that, as in real life, the value of your site will really shine in the long run.

Having said that, unless you didn’t catch it on the first sentence in this post, the single most important bit of knowledge in all of SEO is: online links are a reflection of real world human relations. Machine-generated links are worthless.

Here are some quick ideas.

Get your friends and family to link to you! Orkut, Twitters, sons, cousins, all valuable links, especially for the traffic they might bring you.

Join forums related to hotels and hotel management, especially if such forums exist for your region so you can meet up and create real world links.

Contact friendly hotel managers and propose a joint idea. How about a joint event or special rate 2 weeks each, for a month? How about 10% discount on bookings for the season on both hotels and mutual blog posts to publicize the special rates?

Ask your customers to link to you from their Google Buzz, Orkut, Twitter and Facebook accounts if they liked your hotel.

Invite customers to comment at your hotel blog.

When guests check out, remind them to leave a glowing review at TripAdvisor and communities.

If you happen to host university student groups, or any academic events happen at your hotel, kindly ask them for a link from their personal or faculty pages explaining how to arrive at the hotel. And if they like their stay, why not recommend you to fellow academy members? Google thinks .EDU links are very yummy.

Look for hotels with the same name as yours across the globe and trade links, how about that?

Have celebrities stayed at your place? Have any amusing stories to share? Such content is instant “link magnet”.

These are but a handful of ideas. The main point being: links are but reflections of human relations. Captivate your customers, give them outstanding service and they’ll recommend you both on and offline. What we’ve seen time and again on Twitter and other social media communities is that word of mouth is still the single most powerful force in online marketing. Sites have gone from unknown to absolute success literally overnight. Keep up the good work, strive for perfection and you will inevitably run a hotel site everyone will want to link to.